"For the Wordless Body," A Poem About Diabetes Written Shortly After Diagnosis

As readers of this blog know, diabetes has been a great teacher for me. Here's a poem I wrote a couple of years after being diagnosed (with type 1). It's published in my book from Wesleyan University Press called The Transparent Body.

(You can order the book from my website: http://www.lisabmusic.com/cds_books.html, or from Amazon at http://www.amazon.com/The-Transparent-Body-Wesleyan-Poets/dp/0819521620. If you buy from Amazon, please buy a new copy directly from them rather than another seller, otherwise I won't see any of the proceeds.)

The feeling of first grappling with being officially diabetic rushes back to me when I read this almost three decades after writing it. And much of it remains relevant to my relationship with this constant companion, who brought me into closer communication with my body and helped me know myself better as a spirit.

For the Wordless Body

Mute

the muscle constricts with thirst.
The scent of citrus in the urine,
sugar leaking
into a film across the eyes.
Morning fills the windowpane,
a lit rectangle to be hungry in. I hurry

past buildings, counting out streets,
a self with words
and a hollowing silence of cells.

Language punctures
the skin.
Slimmer than a pen
the syringe shoots the insulin.
The sweetness of tangerines
lingers in the bloodstream. The injection

combusts it into strength and heat.

Body, christened again
you burn too well, flushed
as an infant and shaking for food.
A frantic mother, I bend to you.
At night I fake the bravado
of a teenage boy pinching
a girl's bare leg,
the needle poised above my thigh.
For years you absorbed what I fed you,
then denied.
Now you try to refuse
the sweet essence that keeps us alive.

So I am vigilant
for the sake of eyesight and limbs,
grateful to have seen this particular death
and to walk away. I forgive us

this defect, the first defection
to the dissolving silence
trailing me like a cloak.
It falls from my shoulders
when my arms rise, awkward
and bare, a child's A
against the light.

copyright 1989 Lisa Bernstein

Covered California - New Info on California's Health Exchange Under Affordable Care Act

Covered California! The basics are now online about California's health exchange (or marketplace) for 2014 under the Affordable Care Act. http://www.coveredca.com/

They look good. Premiums and health providers are not settled or provided yet, but the cost calculator's results look promising. This insurance is for folks not covered under a group or employer plan. It will sure make my life easier and lower my costs dramatically as a diabetic. And it will do the same for many others, as preexisting conditions will no longer be a factor. Yay!

By the way, I was interviewed in my home by a nice young market research team a few months back. I didn't know their client but figured it was some health insurance company. Afterward, they confessed they were working on this very website.

Glad to help Obamacare, however unwittingly.

copyright © 2013 Lisa Bernstein

Acknowledge Your Unique Diabetes Journey

You didn’t ask to go, and yet you are on a journey: your diabetes journey. Whether you’re a new diabetic – wondering what the heck you can eat and grappling with the strange paraphernalia of self-care – or an old hand – confidently compensating for the curves that this day threw at your blood-sugar control, or puzzled by the fact that reliable tactics inexplicably didn’t work this time – you’re traveling through life on a pathway shaped by your diabetes.

This journey is shared by millions of other diabetics. Still, your diabetes journey is particular to you: your body, your mind, your spirit.

The diabetes journey is not just a physical one. It’s also a journey for your whole self.

And amid its repetitions, it offers constant change: new sights, new insights, new challenges. What can diabetes teach you about yourself and how you interact with the world? How can you find wellness with it, and keep growing as a person?

For nearly 30 years, I have framed my experience as a diabetic with those questions. With focus and practice, I’ve found some illuminating answers. From the shock of diagnosis long ago to the variations of this very day, diabetes has opened a path for me yielding – along with challenges and demands – more pleasure, insight, clarity, and power.

Part of the reason is that diabetes led me to access and expand my skills as a clairvoyant reader of the human energy system. Working and playing with my intuitive abilities helped me understand and work with diabetes – for myself and others. I came to know myself better and feel more empowered.

But you don’t have to become a clairvoyant reader for diabetes to help you access more of your personal power. Every diabetic has been handed an opportunity to find more awareness, more capabilities, and, paradoxically, given all the demands of this syndrome, the freedom that comes with greater wisdom.

One of the main reasons diabetes offers increased wisdom is that it’s about energy management.

As a diabetic, you already get to focus in a practical, intimate, and, yes, unrelenting way on keeping your body’s energy running, under varying conditions. Whether you know it or not, you’re paying attention not only to your physical self, but also to its invisible but very real driver and companion: your energetic self, that is, your spirit.

Paying attention to the interplay between your body and your energetic self – between the physical car that you’re in and you the driver running it, between the you that is matter and the you that is spirit – is rich with possibilities and revelations.

Fine-tune your energy system – and expand your awareness.

You can learn to fine-tune this interplay between body and energy system using tools that I call “spiritual mechanics” – eight intuitive tools that complement the conventional medical approaches you’re using. Like it or not, you’re already on this journey. Why not bring along some not-quite-visible equipment along with your obvious diabetes paraphernalia for a safer, more exhilarating, and more fruitful ride?

The reward is that you get to play and work more consciously with your own information – that intelligent, shimmering, changing energetic entity that is you and all that you know – to find better health, a better time, and a better life.

copyright © 2013 Lisa Bernstein

Savoring the Golden Apple

"Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could." -- Louise Erdrich

I fell for fiction-writer Louise Erdrich after reading her wonderful novel “Love Medicine” and have since gobbled up her short stories in The New Yorker. I’m overdue to read another novel by her. I’m not sure where this quote came from; I found it in the Facebook post of a good friend today.

I love the imagery of eating and food Erdrich gives us. After bluntly stating that “life will break you,” she reminds us that the reason we are here is to be swallowed up by life, even to the point of being broken and bruised. Next she calls us to notice that the earth’s bounty also often experiences the same cycle, the same falls, the apples “wasting their sweetness.” We are like that bounty. And as we become witnesses to the apples in both their deliciousness and their sad fates, it makes our own suffering somehow more natural and bearable, even lovelier. We have companions in the sweetness “in heaps” all around us.

Finally there’s another turn: we’re not only like the apples, but we get to taste them – taste each other. So the thought comes full circle – we taste, and we are tasted, and it’s this experience that swallows us up. Life is the grand eater and we are its food; and at the same time, we are grand eaters of life.

As a diabetic I love being told to engage with sweetness – to listen to it, to notice its natural source, to tell myself about it, and to taste as much of it as I can.

Of course the apple means knowledge too, knowledge that is both sacred and inextricably involved with the body. No perversion of the story of the Garden of Eden can erase that. The golden apple shines in the stories of many cultures, promising divine information and immortality. How tantalizing that timelessness is offered in such a savory, physical package, one so transitory as it is devoured.

Diabetes gives me similar tantalizing knowledge – glimpses of the precious gold of the present moment in all its physicality, and of the spirit (that is, me) who chooses to savor that moment, over and over.

Taste the day, and enjoy.        

copyright © 2013 Lisa Bernstein